The next morning, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I didn’t have a hangover. I hadn’t drank that much alcohol, but I had still been expecting at least a mild headache. Fortunately, the bodies built by the Market didn’t seem built to feel aftereffects from imbibing too much alcohol. However, the strange leftover drowsiness my body was usually unable to feel left me feeling oddly twitchy. I sleepily rubbed my eyes, before I quietly stood up and brushed myself off.

Then, I looked around the room, taking a look at Sallia, who was still sleeping, and then looking at at Felix, who was standing off to the side with his spear held. I suddenly realized that the three of us hadn’t set a guard for the previous night, and felt a flash of panic as I looked at the door to the room. However, the door was still perfectly intact, as was the furniture we had used to block off hostile entry to the house.

“Don’t worry, there’s nothing there,” said Felix, grinning at me. “Once I saw you and Sallia starting to close your eyes, I realized that our bodies react a little more strongly to alcohol than I thought. I did my best to stay awake and make sure we had a guard.”

I flushed, realizing I should have thought about that. I had grown too used to the islands, where we were safe as long as we stayed in the village, and hadn’t been as wary of the dangers of the Market as I should have been. Enemies were far more abundant here, and if Felix hadn’t been paying attention, things could have ended much worse than they had.

“Thanks, Felix. I really appreciate you staying up and making sure we were safe,” I said.

Felix shrugged. “I’m weaker than you and Sallia. I might as well do what I can for the two of you to make up for that.” He chuckled. “Maybe that’ll change when I get my Abilities and a little more Achievement behind me, but for now, I’ll at least do what I can to still be useful, even with my lower combat abilities. Though, somehow, I doubt I’ll ever match up to Sallia in fighting ability, no matter what abilities I end up with,”

I glanced at Sallia, and also grinned. Trying to keep up with Sallia had only been possible in our previous world because Sallia was hampered by her terrible Stats. Now that she had an Ability to fix that, I doubted she would ever be as helpless in future worlds as she had been on the islands.

Since Sallia was still asleep, I experimentally grabbed my sword and began giving it a few test swings. Since the Market was even more dangerous than we had originally thought, it would be stupid not to grab every advantage I could in combat ability. Sallia had been almost as strong as someone with Beginner Grade swordsmanship, even after losing her body and being forced to relearn her swordsmanship in the Market. I couldn’t help but wonder how much my own combat abilities had degraded.

After about ten minutes of swinging my sword around, I frowned.

My abilities were worse than Sallia’s, and not just by a little bit.

When I had died, I had lost much more than just my physical body. My muscle memory was almost completely gone. I still had some of the snap judgment from my previous life, probably due to the fact I had spent over a decade training in swordsmanship, spearmanship, and archery. Dying wouldn’t remove my memories of all the hard work I had put into learning to fight. However, while I still had my judgment and my knowledge of swordsmanship, without my muscle memory, and since my body had changed upon returning to the Market, it took me a lot more effort to emulate my previously natural fighting abilities. Previously, swinging a sword with perfect form had been nearly instinctive after Sallia drilled it into me through sparring session after sparring session. Now, I was like someone who had all of the theoretical knowledge I needed to swing a sword, but who hadn’t practiced a day in her life. I had all the knowledge I needed to regain my previous level of skill, but I would need to train for quite a while if I wished to regain my previous swordsmanship abilities.

Luckily, as I tried to swing the sword around, I felt {Basic One-Handed Swordsmanship} start to kick in. Knowledge from my previous life started to meld with my thoughts and my muscle memory as I practiced, and my body adapted to the correct stances and instincts I had in my previous life far more quickly than I had expected it to.

At this rate, I could probably get back to Beginner grade Swordsmanship in a few weeks. Reaching Intermediate before our bodies collapsed was probably impossible, but I could definitely reach Beginner in a reasonable timeframe.

As I was swinging around my sword, and Felix watched me with a more than slightly baffled expression, Sallia finally woke up. She took one look at the two of us, before she grinned.

“Training?”

I nodded. “I was trying to see how long it would take me to pick up my old skills again. I figure it’ll take me a few weeks?”

Sallia nodded. “I think I can get back to beginner grade in the same amount of time, more or less. I might also be able to re-condense my first rune.”

Felix frowned. “Huh. I didn’t think of checking that. I suppose that’ll be really useful to know, especially in future lives. Even if I don’t have any Abilities to keep the rune magic system, I’ll still need to retrain weapons every time we die again.” He shrugged, and gave his own spear a few experimental thrusts. He frowned. “I don’t think I can get back to beginner grade as quickly as you two. Maybe a few months for me.”

I frowned, looking at my sword, and then looking at Sallia and Felix. After a few moments, I shrugged.

“Here’s what I think,” I said. “The Market is incredibly dangerous right now, and we need every scrap of Achievement and combat ability we can get. How about we spend a month training in this area, to pick up some of our old skills, then finish hitting up the stores we need? That’ll probably give us some Achievement for reaching certain skill thresholds again, and it’ll hopefully make us strong enough that we’ll be able to actively hunt some skeletons as well. Then, over the next month, we should get some items and finish filling out our Stats. Our bodies will start to decay in a few months, so I figure we spend one month training, one month looking for items, skeletons, and buying stuff, and then go reincarnate again. That should maximize the use of our time in the Market without causing us to accidentally lose another life here,” I said. “We only have four, and we can’t afford to waste any of them if we’re going to get strong enough to buy some lives before we die.”

Felix paused for a moment, before turning to Sallia. Sallia was looking at her sword, and she looked… disappointed?

“Sounds like a good plan,” said Sallia, sighing.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “You see sad.”

“I was a little frustrated over the way some things ended on the islands,” she said, and I couldn’t help but think back to her parents. “I was just thinking that smashing apart some skeletons sounded cathartic, but I guess training for a month first makes a lot more sense. Being safe is much more important than working out some anger,” she said.

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I chuckled. “Don’t worry. We’ll get the chance to dice up some skeletons in a month.”

“I know,” grumbled Sallia. “But it’s just not the same, you know? But we should prioritize our safety, even if I’m unhappy about it. We can responsibly stab things in a month instead of now.”

And just like that, our new round of training sessions began.

* * *

We spent four weeks retraining our abilities as much as we could. Because the house we had taken over didn’t have enough space for drawn-out fights, the three of us also spent a lot of time on the streets just outside of the house, using them as a training field. One of us would keep watch on the area, in case any enemies showed up to interrupt our training, while the other two practiced. Luckily, skeletons and other enemies didn’t seem to wander around the residential area very often.

During our training, my soul consumed 30 Achievement in order to keep me alive. However, due to Sallia’s help, my {Basic One Handed Swordsmanship}, and {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} restoring my access to rune magic, I ended up gaining more Achievement than I lost in that time.

Skill: Gain [Basic] Mastery of a one-handed swordsmanship technique.

Achievement +30

Due to your {Basic One-Handed Swordsmanship} Ability, reaching Basic Grade in one-handed swordsmanship gives extra rewards

Strength +5, Agility+5, Fortitude +5

Power: Condense your first rune out of absorption essence

Achievement +80

I couldn’t help but think the quantity of Achievement I got was a little strange this time. I distinctly remembered that I had originally gotten 100 Achievement for condensing my first rune while we had lived on the islands, instead of the 80 I got this time, and I also recalled getting 25 Achievement instead of 30 for reaching Basic Grade Swordsmanship on the islands. I took the System messages I got during training as a warning that I couldn’t always rely on getting the same rewards for my actions in future lives, even if I didn’t have a very good guess about ‘why’ these numbers changed besides the fact that dimensional laws were somehow related to Achievement, and they were different from world to world. However, I was still delighted to confirm that we could get Achievement for repeating some training-related actions each life. Getting permanent access to the rune system would also provide a small, but steady source of income from world to world as long as I had time to train my abilities back up each world.

However, my Rune this time wasn’t just different in how much Achievement it gave when I formed it. There were some other, important distinctions between how it worked when created from an Ability versus when I had gained access to runes on the islands.

I quickly realized that even though I didn’t need to be sitting in a tub of water to generate absorption essence, due to the fact that absorption essence already existed in the Market, I now got more Absorption Essence if I sat in a tub of water while condensing my rune. Which, in turn, helped me absorb more mana per day and create runes faster than before. I estimated that it increased my Absorption essence generation by about 30%. Which was pretty useful. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that in our next world, if Absorption Essence wasn’t present, instead of getting absorption essence at 130% of the speed I had gained it on the islands, I would be stuck with ONLY 30% of my absorption essence generation. Something to think about later, if I couldn’t find an item or another ability to make up for the difference. I would probably need to accept that I would have lower rune counts on future worlds where absorption essence didn’t naturally exist, until my Absorption Essence Stat was high enough to make up for the difference.

Sallia’s Ability, by contrast, generated a LOT of absorption essence, letting me see just how important Keywords actually were.

My keywords were ocean and madness. Apparently, we weren’t close enough to the ocean of souls for my ‘ocean’ keyword to trigger, and nothing nearby had been driven insane, so neither of my keywords were active right now. This left me with an almost exact copy of the rune magic from the islands. Apart from the ability to steal extra, weird abilities from creatures I killed with water (an ability I had yet to use because drowning a skeleton or crushing it with water pressure seemed… difficult, to say the least), my abilities were pretty similar to those of the islands. The only real difference was that I formed runes very slightly faster than before.

Sallia, however, had the Absorption, Sword, and Training Keywords attached to her rune-related Ability.

She generated a ridiculous amount of absorption essence by training her swordsmanship for a day, because she was absorbing mana, using a sword, and training. She was able to immediately tell when her keywords were active versus when they weren’t, because the difference was massive. her absorption essence regeneration went up by a ridiculous amount whenever she had her keywords active, and the amount she could enhance her body by using her mana reserves increased dramatically when her keywords were active. Everything that her ability did suddenly became more when her keywords were active. I couldn’t help but think it was a shame that Sallia’s Ability was so… basic right now. If Sallia’s ability had any other effects, such as my ability to ‘steal’ Abilities by drowning stuff, she would probably become even more terrifying whenever her keywords were active.

Not that she wasn’t terrifying already.

With the assistance of her three keywords, instead of taking a month to condense her first rune, Sallia took 5 days to condense her first rune.

Then, just to rub in how incredibly powerful keywords were, Sallia stabilized her first rune in about eighteen days, then condensed a second rune before the month ended.

It would take me a year to finish stabilizing my first rune, if I wasn’t mistaken. It had taken Sallia less than 20 days. The difference was so staggering that I couldn’t help but feel impressed. Activating keywords for an Ability mattered far more than I had expected it to.

Felix, who had no keyword abilities, lagged behind the two of us considerably in training. Sallia was now unquestionably the strongest member of the group, followed by me, with Felix lagging far behind us in last place.

We also trained our weapon abilities back up during our month of training. I realized my Basic One-handed Swordsmanship Ability was much better than I had given it credit for. Despite Sallia’s freakish growth speed, the Ability allowed me to keep up with her swordsmanship training until we had both reached Basic Grade, where my Ability stopped boosting my growth, while Sallia just kept growing. However, for a very brief window of time, I was almost able to keep up with Sallia’s freakish swordsmanship abilities, since we both had one rune and I had significantly higher Stats than her. Of course, once she condensed her second rune, she immediately outstripped my combat abilities and left me in the dust. However, I was more happy with my {Basic One Handed Swordsmanship} than I expected to be.

Felix was almost back at beginner grade with his spear, but after some debate, we decided that we didn’t have time to wait for him to regain more of his competence with the spear. We only had a few months in the Market before our body started to deteriorate, and we had already spent a month training. We needed to get moving before our bodies collapsed and we wasted a life in the Market. Besides, with Sallia’s strength we should be able to take down most weaker enemies in the Market, even if we were nowhere close to being able to fight things like the tree root with wooden butterflies yet.

Thus, the three of us moved out of the street we had taken over for the first time in a month.

It was time to finish buying Stats, get some items, and then reincarnate again.